Nokia will abandon its Ovi brand, the handset manufacturer said today. The company had been pushing the mobile services brand hard since its 2007 launch, but the Ovi services will rebranded as “Nokia services” later this year. It is not clear how much of this is to do with Nokia’s tie-in with Microsoft, a deal …

Microsoft has stopped identifying specific Windows Phone handsets when it collects location data from them, and will soon stop any unique device identifiers at all being sent to its location services, the company said yesterday. In a blog post, Windows Phone chief Andy Lees said the data Microsoft collected from the smartphones was for identifying local “landmarks”–nearby Wi-Fi access points …

Pretax profits at the British chip architecture firm ARM Holdings have gone up by more than a third in the last year, the company reported today. According to ARM’s quarterly results, pretax profits stood at 50.8 million pounds ($83.7 million) in the first quarter of 2011, with revenues at 116 million pounds ($185.5 million)–a year ago, those figures were 37.6 …

Google has enhanced the enterprise management capabilities of its Android smartphone platform, making it possible for administrators to secure and reset lost or stolen devices. In a blog post on Thursday, Google Enterprise Mobility Product Manager Mayur Kamat wrote that Android already worked “quite well” with the Google Apps productivity and collaboration suite, but the company was working to provide …

Announced today, Mono for Android widens the scope for mobile developers who use Microsoft’s .Net framework–Novell released a similar product, MonoTouch, for Apple iOS devices in 2009. Mono is the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s toolset, designed to make it possible to run .Net applications across multiple platforms. “We developed Mono for Android to give both individual developers and businesses a …

Nokia has released a beta application that lets people send links and photos from their desktop browser to their Symbian handsets. Dubbed Nokia Drop, the free, experimental app is similar to Google’s “Chrome to Phone” service for Android users. According to a post published on the Nokia blog today, Nokia Drop was built using the cross-platform Qt framework. In addition …

Nokia will start negotiations over job cuts with employees and union representatives in April, the company has said. “We have communicated to employee representatives and employees that we are currently targeting to announce the implications of these changes towards the end of April,” a spokesperson told ZDNet UK today. “At present we have not given a specific date.” The cuts …

Windows Phone 7 updates for Samsung handsets using that operating system are still not working, according to online forum reports. Microsoft restarted the rollout Wednesday, 10 days after it first tried pushing out the update–a relatively minor revision that was intended to facilitate future updates, but also the first to be attempted for the Windows Phone 7 platform. That first …

BARCELONA, Spain–Intel has shown off a developer preview of the tablet user interface for its MeeGo Linux operating system at Mobile World Congress here. At the same time today, the company also addressed Nokia’s withdrawal from the long-term development of MeeGo for mobile phones, with software and services chief Renee James saying the company was “disappointed” with its Finnish partner. …

Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform will work in the interests of application developers, mobile operators, and content publishers, CEO Stephen Elop said today. A couple of hours after Nokia announced its Microsoft tie-in at Nokia’s Capital Markets Day in London, Elop said Windows Phone 7 developers would particularly benefit from the deal, which will …